NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Kids who eat better perform
better in school, a new study of Nova Scotia fifth-graders
confirms.

Students who ate an adequate amount of fruit, vegetables,
protein, fiber and other components of a healthy diet were
significantly less likely to fail a literacy test, Dr. Paul J.
Veugelers of the University of Alberta in Edmonton and
colleagues found.

While a healthy diet is generally assumed to be important
for good school performance, there has actually been little
research on this topic, Veugelers and his colleagues note. To
investigate, they looked at 4,589 fifth-graders participating
in the Children's Lifestyle and School-performance Study, 875
(19.1 percent) of whom had failed an elementary literacy
assessment.

The better a student's eating habits based on several
measures of diet quality, including adequacy and variety, the
less likely he or she was to have failed the test, the
researchers found, even after they adjusted the data for the
effects of parental income and education, school, and sex.
Eating plenty of fruit and vegetables, and getting fewer
calories from fat, was also associated with a lower risk of
failing the test.

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To date, Veugelers and his team say, most research on diet
and school performance has focused on the importance of eating
breakfast, as well as the ill effects of hunger and
malnutrition.

"This study extends current knowledge in this area by
demonstrating the independent importance of overall diet
quality to academic performance," the researchers conclude.

"The consistency of this association across various
indicators of diet quality gives emphasis to the importance of
children's nutrition not only at breakfast but throughout the
day."